I recently installed Samba for the first time, being pretty much
ignorant of Samba, SMB, CIFS, and Windows. I installed on Linux,
which I know a lot about.
It took a great deal of debugging and help from experts to get some
simple file sharing going because of some gaps in the documentation:
It appears that the instructions in the file UNIX-INSTALL won't work
for most users. They direct you to set up a server using nonencrypted
passwords, and all modern Windows systems by default will refuse to
connect to such a server. And Windows being what it is, you don't get
a nice error message telling you you have configured your server wrong
-- the message is "Incorrect password. Enter the correct one."
Therefore, I suggest UNIX-INSTALL be changed to direct the user to set
up a smbpasswd file and put "encrypt passwords = yes" in smb.conf.
Also, considering the uselessness of the Windows error message, I
suggest this case be explained in DIAGNOSIS.TXT.
In UNIX-INSTALL where it talks about doing the ./configure, it would
be nice if it mentioned which of the configure options can be
overridden at run time. It looks like all the file paths can, for
example, and that's very important to me. I like my binaries
portable.
smb.conf.5 has a basic problem that really hindered my being able to
figure it out: It alternates somewhat randomly between the words
"section" and "service". I believe I enventually figured out that
there's something in SMB called a service and a section is a a group
of lines in the file that define one. So a sentence like, "Sections
are either file share services ... or printable services ..." really
doesn't make sense. It ought to read, "A section defines either a
file share service ... or a printable service..."
In smb.conf.5, it needs to mention that "smb passwd file" determines
not only where Samba looks for the smbpasswd file, but also where it
creates the file secrets.tdb. (I'd kind of like to know what the heck
that file is, too).
Samba-PDC-HOWTO contains a typo: http://www.tcpdup.org is messing the
M in tcpdump. But more important, it says there's a SMB enabled
version of Tcpdump on that web page, and there is no mention of SMB
there. And there's no need for Tcpdump to be SMB enabled --
ordinary Tcpdump handles SMB traffic as well as any other. I did
find a version of Tcpdump somewhere else that is extended to interpret
SMB TCP payloads. I'd call that SMB-enhanced.
DIAGNOSIS.txt refers to a "tcpdump-smb" utility, but doesn't give a clue
what it is or where to get it. It should.
The problems I mentioned in UNIX-INSTALL and Samba-PDC-HOWTO carry over into
Samba-HOWTO-Collection.
I'd be happy to rewrite this stuff, but as a Samba neophyte, I probably
wouldn't do the best job. I'd do a lot better than leaving it as it is,
though.
--
Bryan Henderson Phone 408-621-2000
San Jose, California